In Other News first… my laptop is pushing up the daisies. Not entirely sure if I can resurrect it at the moment (although the hard drive is fine), but meanwhile, I shall be the more-than-averagely Occasional Capsuleer. Wave your hand if you happen to have a vaguely Eve capable laptop you’re not in need of right now and live in the UK…
In the meantime, I have performed a spot of necromancy and resurrected my really, really old Acer as a temporary stand in. Having made enough space to make the install, it is now home to a shiny new Eve download and I even managed to make a trip to Jita and restart my PI without it blowing up in my face. I am also training up for an extra PI planet while on holiday; might as well use the non-playing time in a vaguely useful way having brought Combat Drones up to V for Kronos.
So, the Flip. This is a term I have coined for an irritating problem I sometimes run in into while doing PI and trying to make a P2 product on a single planet. Some resources on planets are, inevitably, in short supply. So producing two P1s can often result in few of one, and lots of another. Being lazy (and short on time) I do my best to balance them out to avoid surplus, but on some planets no matter how few extractors you put on, say, Biofuels, you always end up with way more than you need. The solution? The Flip.
It’s pretty simple actually. If producing Biocells, for example, Precious Metals production is likely to be well below Biofuels production. So, after a couple of weeks of producing both, stop producing Biofuels and use the extractors to pull in Noble Metals instead. Repeat this until you have eliminated your reserve of Biofuels, then Flip back to Biofuel production.
Assuming you have a decent surplus, given the disparity in resource richness, you should find that this allows you to keep production steady and in line with your other planets without resorting to importing additional Precious Metals or otherwise having to mess around with your supply lines. You keep everything on-planet, and carry on regardless. You might do this using one planet for Precious Metals and one for Biofuels, but the imbalance would still be there and you’d have to move bulkier resources around, which means more taxation.
Right. Holiday time. On my return, I’ll share a little statistic that might help with your PI planning…